Palmerstonian

Bernard Porter

The Official History of the Falklands Campaign. Vol. I: The Origins of the Falklands War by Lawrence Freedman
Routledge, 253 pp, £35.00, June 2005, ISBN 0 7146 5206 7

The Official History of the Falklands Campaign. Vol. II: War and Diplomacy by Lawrence Freedman
Routledge, 849 pp, £49.95, June 2005, ISBN 0 7146 5207 5

In 1982 Britain’s continued possession of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands was ridiculous. Even at the British Empire’s height they had been one of its least important and favoured colonies. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 they were represented by a showcase containing some tufts of wool and dried grasses. Dr Johnson’s famous description of them in 1771, which Lawrence Freedman uses to open this history, has scarcely been challenged:

a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not even southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future buccaneers.

That last bit, about ‘expense’ and ‘use’, remained the gist of the objection to them by British policy-makers (the people at the Foreign Office, for example); together with the fact that, as they knew full well, but didn’t always let on, Britain’s legal title to the islands was highly dubious. It was anomalous that they remained colonies (or ‘overseas dependencies’) long after most of the rest of the empire had gone. It wasn’t because Britain valued them, even for their potential. (Offshore oil was a rather desperate and unconvincing rationale for them at the time of the 1982 war; it has never been found. Were it to be, Argentine co-operation would be needed to exploit it.) No particular pride was attached to having the Falklands. They were ‘a nuisance’; the situation was a nonsense.

In 1982, when Argentinian troops landed on the Falklands, it looked more nonsensical than ever. There were only two thousand people living there. They wanted to be British, but could remain so only at huge cost to the Treasury (which was already subsidising them heavily), or by reaching some accommodation with their Argentinian neighbour. Alternatively, they could be shipped off somewhere else, which would be very much to Britain’s advantage. It would be cheaper than securing them in the Falklands, which nearly all military experts believed would be impossible to defend were they to be invaded. Britain was 7000 miles away: taking the islands back seemed ‘barely militarily viable’, or at least prohibitively expensive. It would also dangerously divert Britain’s forces from their more urgent Cold War role in Europe. That was why the main goal of FCO policy in the twenty or thirty years before the war had been, reasonably enough, to negotiate some form of transfer.

A condominium was mooted; or a ‘lease-back’ scheme; or an arrangement rather like the one the Åland islands had with Finland. (The Swedish-speaking islanders had been ceded against their will, but with special privileges internationally guaranteed, which seemed to work satisfactorily.) Any of these solutions would have been better than Britain simply hanging on, in deference to a few settlers whose right to have the last say just because they lived there was at least questionable. One British ambassador in South America thought it was

ludicrous that the interests of less than two thousand persons … should be allowed to be a thorn in the flesh of Anglo/Latin American relations, damaging the interests of the more than 50 million population of the United Kingdom. This seems to me to be a case where our principle of self-determination ought to take second place behind the principle that in a democratic society the minority have to bow to the majority.

But the islanders weren’t having any of this; and so successive British governments, clearly frightened of the public (or press) outcry were they to hand patriotic Britons over to foreigners against their wishes, chickened out. Perhaps – some of them reasoned – it might be easier to settle later. The British population of the islands was in decline. The young people were leaving. (One visitor – a Fabian, and clearly jaundiced – pictured them bored out of their minds by ‘an unending diet of mutton, beer and rum, with entertainment largely restricted to drunkenness and adultery, spiced with occasional incest’.) If current trends continued, their ‘fragile economic and social structure’ would collapse. That would force them to come to terms with the logic of their situation: either a compromise, or what one governor called ‘euthanasia by generous compensation’ – i.e. paying them to leave. That’s probably the best one can say for Britain’s foot-dragging. It was the way to get shot of what James Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ with least fuss.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

Bernard Porter’s review of the official history of the Falklands War sent me back to Tam Dalyell’s 1982 book One Man’s Falklands (LRB, 20 October). In Dalyell’s account, the path to war began when Nicholas Ridley returned from Argentina with a ‘lease-back’ deal. When he presented this to Parliament in December 1980 he was savaged by both Conservative colleagues and the Opposition. The Labour attack was led by Peter Shore, then shadow foreign secretary, who asserted that the islanders’ views should be ‘of paramount importance’ – a notion that Ridley had deliberately sidestepped. The Labour MPs, ignorant of South America in general and the Falklands in particular, followed Shore willingly because they sensed that if it came to a vote the government faced defeat (about a hundred Conservative MPs had been brought onside by the Falkland Islands Committee).

Ridley backed off, and there was no agreement with Argentina, but the episode left the impression that the UK government was not deeply committed to the preservation of the status quo in the South Atlantic. Dalyell, in 1982, reckoned this the moment when military conflict became inevitable. The 1980 debate was also crucial to Thatcher’s success in skewering Labour opposition when she came to demand support for the war in April 1982. The islanders’ ‘paramountcy’ was central to her case.

Dalyell’s book makes me wonder why Porter was so kind to those Labour MPs – he hardly mentions them – in his review. In hindsight, it seems to me that the Falklands War was almost as much Michael Foot’s war as Thatcher’s.

Jasper Tomlinson
London SE1

Bernard Porter underestimates the strategic and political significance of the Falkland Islands. It is worth bearing in mind, first of all, that Argentina and Britain continue to dispute ownership of the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Despite the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, Foreign Office ministers accepted arguments from officials that the loss of the Falklands would have important implications in terms of Britain’s capacity to remain in the Antarctic. The late Lord Shackleton understood this broader regional point only too well when he reported on the Falklands in 1976 and 1982. Second, the fate of the Falklands was keenly watched by supporters of Gibraltar, and Porter fails to take into account quite how important both colonies were to a cross-party constituency in Parliament in the 1960s and 1970s. Arguments pertaining to British prestige and ‘kith and kin’ were rapidly and effectively mobilised in order to prevent any profound change in their colonial status. Third, the use of the term ‘colonial’ in the context of the South Atlantic and Antarctic is only ever applied to Britain. As is well known, the Argentines colonised Patagonia in the late 19th century with dire consequences for indigenous populations. Perhaps Britain and Argentina should both be seen for what they are: colonising powers equally unwilling to give up their territories.

Klaus Dodds
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey